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This week’s Q+A is with Daniel Westwood, who speaks to us about his paper from the Shelley Conference: ‘“A maze of light and life”: Artistry and Ideology in Rosalind and Helen and Julian and Maddalo’ . Westwood reflects upon the important relationship that Rosalind and Helen shares with Julian and Maddalo, before expanding upon the centrality of debate and conversation in Shelley’s poetic thought. 1819 Title page of Rosalind and Helen, a Modern Eclogue. How does a consideration of Rosalind and Helen shed light upon our understanding of Julian and Maddalo? Reading Rosalind and Helen and Julian and Maddalo together allows us to trace the development of two things that are vital to Shelley’s poetic thought and technique: his approach to dialogue, including how his poetry explores the interplay between contrasting values and perspectives, and his stance on didacticism. The poems were composed broadly contemporaneously—Rosalind and Helen was transcribed by Mary Shelley in . . .

Membership of the K-SAA is open to all. It includes a subscription to the Keats-Shelley Journal. Our journal, first published in 1952, contains articles on John Keats, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, and their circles of mutual influence and context – as well as news and notes, book reviews, and a current bibliography. Members also receive mailings including invitations to special events, and rates start from as little as $25 per year for students. For more information on how to sign up or renew your membership, please see our ‘How to Join‘ page. We also offer institutional subscriptions. Payments can be made quickly and easily online via PayPal. The first point of contact for membership enquiries is our Treasurer: ksaa.treasurer@gmail.com You can also read more about past issues, the editorial team, and how to submit your own work to the Keats-Shelley Journal here. Thank you . . .

This week’s Shelley conference Q+A is with plenary speaker Nora Crook, who discusses her lecture: ‘Mary Shelley’s Editing of Percy Bysshe Shelley’. Crook expands upon the idea of Mary’s ‘posthumous collaboration’ with Percy, as well as reflecting upon her own experience of editing Percy’s works. Crook speaking at the Shelley Conference at Senate House, London, University of London (Friday 15th September 2017). In your lecture you spoke about Mary’s ‘posthumous collaboration’ with Percy. For those who were unable to attend your paper, can you explain what you mean by this phrase? How does it inform your understanding of the Shelleys? I put the concept of “posthumous collaboration” forward as a deliberate paradox, aware of its contentiousness! Certainly it needs to be hedged around with caveats. (As I said in the lecture, I certainly do not mean that Mary felt herself to be receiving communications from Percy beyond the grave.) I think that . . .

I’d like to take this occasion to highlight some of the wide-ranging activities of K-SAA and to ask again for your support and engaged participation, beginning with renewing your membership and joining us at MLA. As always, at MLA we will be celebrating outstanding work in our field, with an Essay Prize and Distinguished Scholar Awards at our annual dinner. Please join us in honoring our newest Distinguished Scholars, Alan Bewell and Lisa Vargo, as well as outgoing K-SJ Book Review Editor Beth Dolan and Bibliographer Ben Robertson. There will also be an opportunity at the dinner to introduce new K-SJ Review Editors, Yasmin Solomonescu and Andrew Burkett, along with K- SAA’s new Director of Communication, Anna Mercer. Our two-tier price structure for this dinner is meant to better enable graduate students and contingently-employed faculty to attend. Please alert members of the profession whom you know to qualify for the lower rate and encourage them to attend this important and wonderfu . . .

Keats’s Hair Thank you to Susan Wolfson for sending us this post. Inspired by this image of the hairdressers close to Keats House (previously Wentworth Place) in Hampstead, London, she has collected together some evocative descriptions of the poet’s locks. We present this post as a late 222nd birthday celebration for the poet. He was born on 31 October 1795. Image: Michael Wood His hair, of a brown colour, was fine, and hung in nat­ural ringlets. (Leigh Hunt) his hair fell in rich masses on each side his face (Mrs. Procter) his hair was beautiful– a fine brown, rather than auburn; if you placed your hand upon his head, the silken curls felt like the rich plum­age of a bird (Benjamin Bailey) a shape­ly head set off by thickly clustering gold-brown hair; (Sidney Colvin) an unusually small head, covered with copious auburn-brown ringlets (W. M. Rossetti) – Susan Wolfson There are now multiple businesses and streets named after K . . .

Suzanne Barnett delivered a paper for the Roundtable on Keats’s Afterlives at the Keats Symposium, “The Emergence of Keats as a Poet,” hosted by Fordham University on October 7, 2017. Her paper addressed affinities between Keats and musical groups from the 1980s, such as Duran Duran and Adam and the Ants. Here she discusses Keats’s influence on contemporary music and why he attracts some genres while others reject the Keatsian aesthetic. Why do you think Keats was so amenable to 80s new wave culture, and not other genres or musical trends like “grunge” (which started in the mid- to late-eighties and shared its own set of stars who died prematurely)? My initial reaction to this question was something like an audible “bleargh” because I did a good job of avoiding grunge the first time around, but I’ll bite: grunge’s primary aesthetic was, I think we can all agree, a self-conscious resistance to having a definable aesthetic, a raw realism that inevita . . .

This week from the Shelley conference, Sharon Ruston reflects on her paper ‘Chemistry and the Shelleys’. Ruston highlights the influence of Humphry Davy on the Shelleys’ work, as well as thinking about the continued relevance of their literary investigations of science in the twenty-first century. ‘Sir Humphry Davy, Bt’ by Thomas Phillips (1821) The influence of science on the works of the Shelleys is a particularly important area of study in Romantic criticism. How did your paper rethink the Shelleys’ engagement with Humphry Davy and the chemistry of the Romantic period more broadly? I was trying to argue that a specific aspect of the chemistry of the day appealed to the Shelleys and found its way into their writings on politics, literary creation, poetics, and identity. Namely, chemists such as Davy thought that all the elements of the world already existed, that they could be neither created nor destroyed but were instead transformed into new mo . . .

K-SAA News: New Director of Communications, Dr Anna Mercer I am delighted to be appointed as the new Director of Communications for the K-SAA. Here’s a little about me. I recently completed my AHRC-funded PhD at the University of York, UK, where I wrote my thesis on the collaborative literary relationship between Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley. This research included delving into the manuscripts of the Shelleys. I am interested in evidence of Mary Shelley’s hand in P B Shelley’s writings; deconstructing Mary’s role as amanuensis and collaborator allows us to consider the Shelleys’ reciprocal support for one another’s literary talents. I’ve also been thinking about the Shelleys’ shared workspaces and the textual connections between their works. In addition to publishing on this particular literary dialogue, I’ve also written about the relationship between S. T. Coleridge and his daughter Sara Coleridge. I have experience of ru . . .

Next up from the Shelley Conference, Bysshe Inigo Coffey reflects on his paper: ‘Verse Under Erasure: Shelley and the Energies of Cancellation’. Coffey explains why we should pay attention to Shelley’s cancellations and silences, before highlighting the possibilities and limitations of rhyming in Shelley’s works. Last week, Madeleine Callaghan explained how the rejected stanzas of Laon and Cythna demonstrates Shelley’s ‘keen awareness of his [poetic] duties’ (https://k-saa.org/shelley-conference-m-callaghan-on-laon-cythnas-ditched-opening). How should we study and draw attention to Shelley’s manuscript cancellations as well as respect his reworkings and deliberate omissions? We tend to think of cancellation and deletion in largely negative terms. It would be good to rethink that slightly. Conventionally, the cancelled or deleted is something bracketed, stilled, lopped off, excised—to be forgotten. The backspace of the keyboard seems to emphasise this negativity (with words no longer . . .

This week Madeleine Callaghan reflects on her Shelley conference paper: ‘“Sweet visions in solitude”: P. B. Shelley’s Rejected Opening of Laon and Cythna’. Callaghan discusses the centrality of Laon and Cythna’s rejected stanzas in Shelley’s wider oeuvre before highlighting their significance in relation to Shelley’s understanding of poetic responsibility. Why do you think relatively little critical attention has been paid to the rejected opening of Laon and Cythna, and how might these stanzas shed new light on Shelley? As Shelley chose not to include the lines in Laon and Cythna, instead rejecting them in favour of an alternative opening,[1] critics have not explored them a great deal.[2] But the rejected opening to Laon and Cythna is highly significant for any discussion of Shelley’s preoccupation with something beyond the human. If Shelley’s work is marked by a ‘desire to reform the world [that] is always crossed by a desire to transcend it’,[3] I see these lines as exploring the li . . .

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If you aren't yet a member of the K-SAA, please visit our "Join" page, which offers a number of membership levels from which to choose. By becoming a member of the K-SAA, you also receive a subscription to the Keats-Shelley Journal.